The Connecticut Supreme Court is expected to release its ruling Thursday on whether to uphold or overturn its decision last year to abolish the state's death penalty, including for inmates on death row.

The justices ruled 4-3 last August that the death penalty was unconstitutional for all – including 11 convicts on Connecticut's death row – following the legislature's abolition three years ago of capital punishment in Connecticut. Lawmakers made the law prospective, meaning it applied only to new cases and kept in place the death sentences already imposed on those facing execution before the bill was passed.

Attorneys for those on death row challenged the law, saying it violated the condemned inmates' constitutional rights. The ruling last August came in the case of Eduardo Santiago, who had faced the death penalty for the December 2000 killing of Joseph Niwinski in West Hartford. Santiago has been resentenced to life in prison without the possibility of release.

In the August ruling, the justices in the majority wrote that executing an inmate "would violate the state constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment" and that the death penalty "no longer comports with contemporary standards of decency."

In October, the high court denied a request by the chief state's attorney to postpone the Santiago decision, a ruling that followed its denial of a request by prosecutors to re-argue Santiago.

Prosecutors then filed briefs arguing for the Santiago decision to be overruled in the pending appeal of Russell Peeler, who was sentenced to death for ordering the 1999 killings in Bridgeport of 8-year-old Leroy "B.J." Brown Jr. and his mother, Karen Clarke. The justices heard arguments on those briefs in January.

Prosecutors said in deciding the Santiago case, the court "did not confine its analysis" to the actual claim raised -- whether enacting the 2012 law invalidated the death sentences of those sentenced before the law went into effect. The court made its ruling, prosecutors said, "for reasons having little or nothing to do with" enactment of the 2012 law and "erred in its ruling on lines of analysis and authorities the parties had not discussed."

Prosecutors also argued that the justices relied on "flawed historical analysis" to justify their "departure from well-established principles of law" and incorrectly determined that state residents prior to the 1818 constitution gave the high court the authority to act independently to invalidate a penalty.

Prosecutors said the justices' "new insights" into Connecticut history came from Lawrence B. Goodheart's book "The Solemn Sentence of Death: Capital Punishment in Connecticut," which actually says, according to prosecutors, that the legislature, not the court, "has been the historical source for both limiting capital punishment and providing relief to those sentenced to death."

Chief Justice Chase T. Rogers, who joined with Justice Carmen E. Espinosa and Justice Peter T. Zarella in the August dissents, wrote then that "every step" of the majority's opinion was "fundamentally flawed." During the arguments last January, both the majority and minority raised concerns about the idea of a reversal following the retirement of Justice Flemming Norcott Jr., who had joined with justices Richard N. Palmer, Dennis G. Eveleigh and Andrew J. McDonald to ban capital punishment. Norcott was replaced by Justice Richard A. Robinson.

"Why shouldn't the court be concerned that every time there's a hotly contested 4-3 decision ... that this isn't just going to become a numbers game, that the parties will then wait until somebody retires or leaves the court and raise the issue again?" Rogers said. "It just seems like a very slippery slope."

"At a minimum," Palmer said, "it looks awfully odd to have a case of this magnitude decided differently within months simply because the panel changes. That's really what would be happening here."

But Senior Assistant State's Attorney Harry Weller countered that citizens' confidence in the judicial system is harmed if a wrong decision stays in place and that it is the court's job to fix it.

"This court's ultimate responsibility is to uphold the Constitution and to get the law right," he said.

Public defenders for Peeler made several arguments against overruling the Santiago decision in court briefs, pointing foremost to the legal doctrine of "stare decisis" -- letting decided issues stand. Senior Assistant Public Defender Mark Rademacher told the justices that the state faced an "uphill battle" in getting the ruling reversed.

"What the state is asking this court to do ... is simply breathtaking," Rademacher said at the January hearing. "It is asking this court to overrule a long line of cases that have affirmed the court's authority as a constitutional matter to protect the citizens of this state against cruel and unusual punishment."